Dealing With Mastitis
If you wake up one morning with flu-like symptoms, including a fever; your breasts feel firm, swollen, and painful and are red or red-streaked and hot to the touch, chances are you're dealing with mastitis (the inflammation of the breast tissue and/or the milk ducts in all or a portion of the breast).
Between 1 and 5% of breastfeeding mothers will develop mastitis at some point during breastfeeding. Mastitis can be caused by a sudden decrease in the frequency of feedings (e.g., your baby goes on a nursing strike)—which can result in blocked ducts, cracked nipples, and/or inadequate milk drainage. While mastitis can be miserable to deal with while it lasts, it usually clears up quickly if you continue to nurse your baby from the affected breast, get plenty of rest, drink plenty of fluids, and take an antibiotic if one is recommended by your doctor.
Here are some other important tips on coping with the misery that is mastitis.
Increase the frequency of your baby's feedings, offering your baby the infected breast first in order to promote maximum drainage. Don't worry about passing the infection on to your baby; this is one thing you can scratch off your "new parent worry list" right now.
Apply heat to the infected breast (either by having a warm shower or by applying warm washcloths) and massage the affected area before and during each nursing session to encourage the milk to flow.
Experiment with a variety of different nursing positions until you find the one that allows for maximum milk drainage. (Ideally you want to choose a position that will allow your baby's nose and chin to be lined up with the affected area.)
Take acetaminophen for the pain (it will also help to bring down your fever) and get in touch with your doctor if the infection hasn't eased up within six to eight hours. Your doctor may want to prescribe some sort of antibiotic to help clear up the infection.
Untreated or poorly treated breast infections occasionally develop into a breast abscess (a collection of pus in one area of the breast). You should suspect that you've developed a breast abscess if your mastitis symptoms continue even after you've been taking antibiotics for two or three days. If you're still feeling miserable at this point you will need to get in touch with your doctor right away. The abscess will need to be drained surgically. In the meantime, continue to breastfeed your baby as usual.
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